Tiny house + parking garage = the future of urban housing?

Living in a tiny house can make a lot of sense if you have a place to put one, which can be relatively easy to do if you live in the country or a suburban area that doesn't have rigorous restrictions on backyard structures or dwellings, but if you live in the city, finding a spot for a tiny house can be rather difficult.

But a new project from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) has one possible solution for urban sustainable living, which is to build micro-houses that fit inside the footprint of a standard parking space, and then place them in parking garages in small communities.

According to the SCADpad project's site, there are currently 105 million parking spaces in the US (said to be five spaces for each car), and that at least half of those parking spaces are vacant 40% of the time, which means that there's a whole lot of empty space that could be used for housing with the right type of structure. And the right type of structure for living in a small footprint such as a parking space might be tiny houses similar to the prototypes that SCADpad has built, which will fit inside a standard parking space measuring 16' by 8'.

"SCADpad evolved from one powerful question: How can design change the world? As our global population continues to grow and concentrate in cities, SCAD, as a transformer in art and design education, has cultivated an entirely new vision of an urban community." - SCADpad

These micro-houses are designed to be fully self-sufficient, with a kitchen, bathroom, and adaptable living space inside the 135 square foot dwellings, and to share a common green space with other units to create a community feeling. The green space includes an organic community garden, fed by a greywater system, and a shared recycling and composting center aims to minimalize the waste from the units. A maker space ("rapid prototyping area") that has a 3D printer for customizing the units allows residents to make the tiny houses better suit their individual needs, and a daylight harvesting structure on the roof of the parking garage brings sunlight to the interior of the micro-community.